If there's one consistent piece of criticism that gets lobbed in Canonical's and Mark Shuttleworth's direction, it's that they do not contribute enough code - or anything else for that matter - to the Free software world. Mark Shuttleworth has apparently had enough, and has written a very, very lengthy blog post detailing how he feels about this criticism.

Canonical make Linux more accessible to a wider audience and try to make some things that have haunted Linux for years, much easier. Here's a few examples:

Installation of hardware drivers like the NVIDIA graphics driver. It's so easy to install, you just activate it, simple. New users want 3D accelerated drivers, especially Windows users and they don't want to add repositories, find which packages to install, which is guess work to them.

Simple installation. Now Linux isn't exactly hard to install but the Ubuntu installer doesn't give hardly any of that verbose crap new users want to see. It's easy to install and says what it can do during the install.

Media. Prompt people to install codecs easy and Flash. In fact, that happens in Rhythmbox for mp3 playback. they also provide cloud storage and a music store for main stream music which new users want.

Software Centre. It may need some work but it's a ton better than some of the package managers out there.

Most Linux distros just don't care about the above things and that's why they will never meet the needs of the average computer buyer. If you like Linux like me and can use any distro, fine but don't expect the mass of people to do it, because it's not going to happen, they need something like Ubuntu.

Canonical could do more in fixing the lower stack of Linux that's for sure(graphics drivers), but it's not like Canonical close source their software or hide it behind closed doors(Novell did at one point with Compiz).

Canonical make Linux more accessible to a wider audience and try to make some things that have haunted Linux for years, much easier.

Imagine Canonical was evil and selfish. What would be their objective? They would want their product to be successful (as is the only way to survive), so they need users, and the way to do that is with a good user experience.

Nobody is denying that they have done good things for Ubuntu. The observation is that its only for Ubuntu, which means Canonical is not a member of the linux community, and that's fine, but they shouldn't be pulling PR stunts trying to make believe like they are.

Installation of hardware drivers like the NVIDIA graphics driver. It's so easy to install, you just activate it, simple. New users want 3D accelerated drivers, especially Windows users and they don't want to add repositories, find which packages to install, which is guess work to them.

That is fine, but Fedora goes for the home run; a public, completely open source driver that has no license issues and can be used by all the distributions.

Simple installation. Now Linux isn't exactly hard to install but the Ubuntu installer doesn't give hardly any of that verbose crap new users want to see. It's easy to install and says what it can do during the install.

Same with many other distributions which you have obviously not tried; e.g Fedora, OpenSUSE.

Media. Prompt people to install codecs easy and Flash. In fact, that happens in Rhythmbox for mp3 playback. they also provide cloud storage and a music store for main stream music which new users want.

This wasn't developed by Canonical, and in fact it was deployed first on Fedora IIRC.

Software Centre. It may need some work but it's a ton better than some of the package managers out there.

Clearly you haven't tried PackageKit, which was developed by Fedora, for all distributions and all package managers, and eventually Ubuntu would also use it.

Most Linux distros just don't care about the above things and that's why they will never meet the needs of the average computer buyer. If you like Linux like me and can use any distro, fine but don't expect the mass of people to do it, because it's not going to happen, they need something like Ubuntu.

They do care, but doing things right takes more time.

There will be eventually a company that has the right talent to create good UIs and is a good member of the open source community. At that point Ubuntu would disappear into oblivion just like it came.

Canonical could do more in fixing the lower stack of Linux that's for sure(graphics drivers), but it's not like Canonical close source their software or hide it behind closed doors(Novell did at one point with Compiz).

Canonical doesn't need to fix anything, they just need to make their code distribution agnostic, and perhaps push things in a truly open source way. See how Fedora made PackageKit available to everyone for example. But they simply don't care.

And you are mistaken, Novell closed Xgl, compiz is something totally different.

Imagine Canonical was evil and selfish. What would be their objective? They would want their product to be successful (as is the only way to survive), so they need users, and the way to do that is with a good user experience.

A company is by definition selfish.

That is fine, but Fedora goes for the home run; a public, completely open source driver that has no license issues and can be used by all the distributions.

Which, last I heard, is still worse than the binary blob and at least on my card doesn't offer 3D acceleration.

Same with many other distributions which you have obviously not tried; e.g Fedora, OpenSUSE.

Yes, because things like LVM make so much sense to the home user!

Clearly you haven't tried PackageKit, which was developed by Fedora, for all distributions and all package managers, and eventually Ubuntu would also use it.

Yet Software Center is the easiest front-end. People like big buttons and fluffy clouds.

Canonical doesn't need to fix anything, they just need to make their code distribution agnostic, and perhaps push things in a truly open source way. See how Fedora made PackageKit available to everyone for example. But they simply don't care.

Why doesn't pacman work in Ubuntu? There, I suppose Arch is a selfish and evil distribution!

I didn't say Ubuntu made the codec install easy, I said it's easy in their distro. Other distros just don't have this setup right or they don't have the repos to support the codecs that are being asked for.

As for Packagekit, yeah it's pretty decent(Note that I didn't mention it as one of the bad package managers) but as pointed out on planet GNOME, the update systems' descriptions of it's updates are very ambiguous.